Three years ago, Russell Vought, President Trump’s choice to become director of the Office of Management and Budget, argued that “the stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country,” in which “our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus, and they have aimed it at us.”
Vought views American politics as a life-or-death struggle between the God-fearing right and a malevolent, secular left. In a 2022 essay in The American Mind, “Renewing American Purpose,” Vought gives his assessment of the Biden administration:
The scary part is that this regime is now increasingly arrayed against the American people. It is both woke and weaponized. The national security state, with organs like the F.B.I., N.S.A., and C.I.A., are aligned against the American people, who are outraged by this revolution they never assented to. The F.B.I. is investigating concerned parents attending open school board meetings as domestic terrorists. They are putting political opponents in jail. The N.S.A. is surveilling the conversations of citizens. Therefore, the hour is late and time is of the essence to expose the charade, rally the country against it toward self-government once again, and seize every leverage point to arrest the damage.
In times past, Vought — who famously asked “Is There Anything Actually Wrong With ‘Christian Nationalism?’” in Newsweek in 2021 — would have been seen, and dismissed, as an over-the-top extremist well outside the boundaries of mainstream politics. Today, he is a lauded Trump loyalist on the verge of his second tour of duty with the president, in one of the most powerful posts in the federal government.
In Vought’s vision of the apocalyptic battle for the soul of America, Democrats are “increasingly evil.” The federal work force, in turn, is the enemy that must be forced into submission. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains,” Vought, who is 48, declared last year. “We want to put them in trauma.”
Vought, if all goes according to plan, will be confirmed as O.M.B. director by the Senate this week.
In that role, Vought is determined to wipe out any vestiges of Democratic control of the United States government. In December 2022, he wrote that Democratic control had resulted in
the emergence of political prisoners, a weaponized, SWAT-swaggering F.B.I., the charges of “domestic terrorism” and “disinformation” in relation to adversaries’ exercise of free speech and the reality that the National Security Agency is running a surveillance state behind the protective curtain of “national security.” The immediate threat facing the nation is the fact that the people no longer govern the country; instead, the government itself is increasingly weaponized against the people it is meant to serve.
The protest over the killing of George Floyd, in Vought’s view, “obviously was not about race. It was about destabilizing the Trump administration,” part and parcel of “the left’s belief that structures in society are the problem. Pulling society down for purposes of revolution is exactly what they want.”
Perhaps the most effective tool for defanging the deep state, according to Vought, is the attack on job protections for the 50,000 federal workers who manage the details and enforce policy. Under the proposal, originally known as Schedule F — it has been renamed Schedule Policy/Career — President Trump would be free to fire anyone in this civil service category who does not comply with his orders.